so long- guess we see the content of your character now

There’s a woman i was friends with for a few years although we never met face to face. She came across me during those evenings i spent on Austin Access during the year and a half or so that i’d moved back from SF. She was an intelligent woman whose sexual appetite was as voracious as i wished mine was. She loves cock. She loves pussy. What she didn’t love was her husband. That’s fine- i never judged her on this. I never judged her on the lovers that she had behind his back either. She deserved to be sexually fulfilled; we all do. The number of loveless and sexless marriages that other people have in this nation is truly astounding.

The arrangement she had with her husband was more of the norm than an exception; barely friends, no sex and only a modicum of respect for one another. But like i said, she deserved to have lovers. It may not have been perfect but at least it was something more than her mate would/ could give her.

We would chat and bounce e-mails back and forth for a few months, then go our separate ways for a while. Then we’d reconnect and catch up, always sharing the most explicit experiences or thoughts that we had.
But then there was The Summer of Hate. Last year- 2009. The birth of the Teabaggers. The cresendo of corporate sponsored scree, anti-intellectualism, birthers, tenthers and the whole myriad of flag waving, screaming, sanctimonious “patriots” who cared about as much about having an honest debate about health insurance reform as they do about the 400k to 1.3 million or so that are now dead in Iraq (send your thanks to the Leo Straussian neo-cons of the previous administration). She seemed to be a tenther. In a nutshell, the tenthers like to cite the 10th Amendment which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

This Amendment was relatively obscure until the Civil Rights Movement, when southern politicians began to use it and the phrase “Family Values” to try and prevent federal legislation from intruding on what they perceived as an afront to their sovereignty. Specifically, the 10th Amendment argument was a political tool used to try and preserve segregation. The Family Values declaration was a moral values statement used as code when the mantra of white supremacy fell out of fashion.

Let me be clear- the woman i’m discussing is not a bigot. I’m simply providing some background on where the tenthers came up with the idea of using the 10 Amendment as a legal argument.

The Summer of Hate took a heavy toll on me. I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people. They tended to be either screamers with the corporate talking points (Fox/ NewsCorp, Freedom Works in particular) or so full of bizarre hypocrisy that it was impossible to take them seriously. In all of their screaming about socialism, never once did one of them spew and rail against our socialized schools, socialized programs like Medicare and Medicaid and not once did any of them decry the evils of the fully socialized Veterans Administration (The doctors that work for the VA, the staff and the buildings they work in are fully owned and operated by the government. Medicare and Medicaid are wholly administered by the government). And where do they usually do their spewing? In public (aka: socialized) parks.

So there was this hypocrisy that is the fertile fruit of those that live with and in cognative dissonance. But that wasn’t really what distanced me from her. Given time and enough patience, i honestly believe we could have discussed the subject of Health Insurance Reform in a dignified manner.

What really set me off, what really caused me to lose respect for her was that here she is- she’s in a marriage of convenience and has had lovers on the side. It wasn’t the fact that she was as loyal as a hare in March, it wasn’t that she sided with the white wing nationalist nutjobs during the Summer of Hate. What it was, was that her posts on Facebook that were constantly about how much she loved her family and her husband in particular and how nothing and no one was ever as important as her wonderful husband. I’m sorry dear, this is the guy you were mostly indifferent to, that you had no sexual urges for and often talked about leaving because your marriage was as void of love as a Teabagger is full of calm and reason.

I can’t say it enough- i’ve never judged her because of her sex drive or her affairs but to tell me for years about how much she disliked or, at best, was indifferent to her husband, then all of a sudden parade how much she loved him and how he was the most important thing next to her children was too hypocritical. The fact that she apparently has no interest in talking to me anymore just makes me roll my eyes and laugh a bit. Nothing makes me lose respect more for a person than people screaming how moral and upright they are when i know they’re actually neither.

Yes dear, we both know you’re as pure as the driven mud- and frankly, that’s why i loved talking to you. In that respect, you were a refreshingly honest departure from the repressed, ignorant no talent ass monkeys in Texas that usually spew their “family values” scree while spending their Saturday nights looking for truckers to give blowjobs to at rest stops or raising children that become pregnant by the time they’re 17 (and usually have two or three STD’s by that age). But this charade that you’ve magically realized that your marriage is beautiful and that your devotion to your husband is absolute is about as convincing as listening to a fundamentalist preacher screaming how they’re being persecuted when they were caught on tape at a gay bar.

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1 Comment

I’m sorry you lost your friend, Shel. Not sure I understand one thing in your post – you said that she used to have lovers and all – but do you know if she is still doing that? I only ask because I was thinking maybe she’s had some sort of life perspective change. Maybe she’s come to some point in her life where she and her husband have reconciled their relationship and she no longer seeks something she is missing outside of the relationship. I know I sound like I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but it was something that wasn’t very clear. So do you know if she’s still cheating on her husband? Or is it possible she’s changed?